I took the wheel myself and steered the ship across the floating funeral train. Once we grazed the bow of an East Indiaman; again we cut in two a war canoe of the islanders; out of the mist they swept appallingly upon us. Nor could we pause to see what became of the shattered craft. A half an hour and we sailed in freer waters; for several minutes not one circling apparition loomed through the mist; the set of the current grew less impetuous; and the fog seemed to rarefy. Before long a luminous warmth mingled with the nebulous atmosphere; we could see denser masses move and break above us; and at last a corona of light shone hazily through the gloom. Our hearts leapt within us; and yet we repressed the cry of joy that rose spontaneously to our lips, for we might only be passing across from one circle of eclipse to another. The glimmer of light grew into intermittent gleams and then broke into the resplendence of full day. The repressed cheer burst forth at the sight, and our comrades stirred in their trance at the sound. They rubbed their eyes and awoke. They marvelled at our jubilance, and thought that they had fainted but the minute before. It had been an hour or so after daybreak that we entered the circle of death and now the sun was westering towards its set. The long hours of fast and terror and anxious thought had exhausted those of us who had been awake. And after instructions to those who had but risen from sleep to stop the ship and watch, we succumbed to our fatigue.
We lay inert for almost twenty-four hours, and our comrades, after stopping the engines, had again fallen into their trance. It was more than mere exhaustion that held us so imprisoned in unconsciousness; it was the magnetic power of the ring of mist through which we had passed.
I learned afterwards the causes of this strange phenomenon, though for years it remained a mystery to me. Thousands of ages before a submerged continent had left an irregular oval like a broken ring close to the surface of the water; and this annular reef consisted chiefly of magnetic iron molten from the adjacent rocks by the heat of the great central volcano that formed the nucleus of the gigantic atoll; on this adamantine ellipse the coral insects had raised their lace-like ridge. Upon the north and south sides of it respectively two great currents impinged, one from the tropics and one from the antarctic regions. The warmer rush of waters was bent round the eastern side of the circular wall of iron, the colder broke round the western side; and instead of losing all their impetus, or neutralising each other, they ran parallel most of their watery orbit before they mingled; and this continuous proximity of hot and cold generated the circle of steam that sealed the waters of this mighty unknown atoll. Into the swift circle of death ships were sucked both from north and south, and the magnetic force of the iron foundations of the reef caught their life in the trammels of sleep and then of death. Never before had a power that could master these subtle forces entered the sphere of their influence. Steam had broken the seal of this annular exhalation. And good fortune had led me to steer our new craft through the only opening left unpiled by the little coral workers. A feeble branch of the elliptic current found its way into the quieter waters within; and upon this we chanced in our efforts to get clear of the ships of death that swept on in funeral procession.
So gentle was this current that I had not noticed it before I fell asleep; and when I awoke under the stroke of the noon’s rays I found that we were drifting rapidly upon a precipitous coast.
With the swiftness of alarm I wakened my men and sent her spinning astern at full speed. As we stood out from the land, I could see it was a low island or promontory, for the water beyond gleamed across it. And far in the distance were the dim outlines of two or three islands that broke the horizon line; and like an iceberg rose, at a still greater distance, the snow-capped peak of some great mountain that seemed companion to the clouds of fleece in the sky. Behind us lay the wall of mist through which we had broken; the eastern curve of the ellipse was too far off to show the slightest fleck of mist above the rim of sky.
CHAPTER III
LANDING
AT last, I was sure, we were about to know a people that had not blurred the features of primeval virtue. And yet I laughed at the thought. What was there in human nature to insure material advance without contamination of the spirit? How were the ages to whip the old Adam out of us but by new vices? Never had the world known exception. But here were lands fenced off from contagion for uncounted ages. Perchance the strange conditions had evolved a simpler civilisation; perchance the strange quarantine in human history had checked the influx of all common spiritual disease.